The camera phone, like many complex systems, is the result of converging and enabling technologies. There are dozens of relevant patents dating back as far as 1956, but since the advent of the smartphone, camera phones have become both ubiquitous and highly functional. Indeed, some have estimated that there are 2.5 billion camera phones in the world, and sales are expected to top a billion per year in 2012.
For example, with the commercial success of e.g., the iPhone 4S, several features have become commonly available that make the camera phone a useful scientific tool. The iPhone 4 allows a picture to be taken from either direction (e.g., in front or behind the phone). It has a built in LED flash and can take an 8-megapixel photograph. It also has an optical zoom, and touch autofocus, and can take 1080 p video recordings. It also has face detection, video stabilization, a faster, dual core processor, support for both GSMUMTS and CDMA on one chip, GLONASS support, a natural language voice control system called Siri and is available in up to 64 GB capacity.
However, to truly realize the camera phone as a scientific tool, ancillary equipment is needed for particular scientific applications, one of which is a device to hold the phone and the lab samples at a fixed and reproducible distance from each other. The inventions described herein provide some of these accessories.